At the same time, however, as we have seen, the “backward” Philippines was also the one colony in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia to have a real university—even if this was dominated by the ultra Dominican Order. Santo Tomás schooled Isabelo and many of his nationalist companions; here, ultimately, lay the reason why the Philippines became, at the century’s end, the site of the first nationalist revolution in Asia.

  Enlightment came to the Philippines through the unbackward language of “backward” Spain, and its prime agents, in every sense of the word, were therefore (at least) bilingual. (Many of the first generation of Philippine intellectuals also learned Latin, with some French, in Manila; if they went abroad, they might acquire some English and German as well.) Nowhere does one detect any marked aversion or distrust towards this Romance language so heavily marked by Arabic, the common vehicle of both reaction and enlightenment. Why this should have been so is a very interesting question. One answer is surely that, in complete contrast to almost all of Latin America, Spanish was never even close to being a majority language in the Philippines. Dozens of mainly oral local languages flourished then, as indeed they do today; nothing in Isabelo’s writing suggests that he thought of Spanish as a deep menace to the future of Ilocano. Furthermore, Castilian appeared to him as the necessary linguistic vehicle for speaking not only to Spain but also, through Spain, to all the centers of modernity, science, and civilization. It was more an international language then it was a colonial one. It is striking that Isabelo never considered the possibility that, by writing in Spanish, he was somehow betraying his pueblo or had been sucked into a dominant culture. I think the reason for this seemingly innocent stance is that, in the 1880s, the future status of Las Islas Filipinas was visibly unstable, and some kind of political emancipation was looming on the horizon.

  This instability had everything to do with local circumstances, but it was ultimately grounded in the emancipation of Latin America more than half a century earlier. Spain was the only big imperial power that lost its empire in the nineteenth century. Nowhere else in the colonial world did the colonized have such examples of achieved liberation before their eyes. Here one sees a situation wholly different from that of the twentieth-century New World, where Spanish became the “eternal” majoritarian master over all the indigenous languages in Latin America, and over an equally “eternal” oppressed minority in the United States. No emancipation visible on the horizon in either case.

  Nonetheless, as indicated above, there are instructive reticences in Isabelo’s youthful work, marked by the uneasy pronominal slippages between I and they, we and you. He was always thinking about two audiences, even when writing for one and a half. “The worst of men is the wretch who is not endowed with that noble and sacred sentiment which they call patriotism,” he wrote. Spanish was not for him a national language, merely international. But was there a national language to which it could be opposed? Not exactly. The local languages with the largest numbers of speakers—Ilocano in the north, Tagalog in the middle, and Cebuano in the south—were all relatively small minority languages, and only just starting to burst into print. Was there a clear-cut patria to which his own language could be attached? A hypothetical Ilocano-land? He never spoke of it as such. Besides, there were those Aetas and Igorots, with their own languages, who were his hermanos. There were also those Tagalogs who, his investigations had shown him, were not a “race distinct” from the Ilocanos; but he knew, as the discoverer of this truth, that as yet few Tagalogs or Ilocanos were aware of it. This state of fluidity thus led him back, at twenty-three years old, to the obscurely bordered culture out of which he grew, and which he sensed he had partly outgrown. Ilocano popular knowledge, or culture, thus came to its young patriot as something to be investigated from the outside, as well as to be experienced from within, to be displayed to the whole world, but also something to be corrected—of course, by the Ilocanos themselves. His mother tongue, Ilocano, thus became something to be translated, yet partly untranslatable. And at some points it even slipped quietly away beyond the sunlit horizon of the Enlightened young bilingual himself.

  1. Although Isabelo had a long and honorable career—aspects of which will be discussed in the final chapter of this book—no remotely adequate professional biography yet exists. The account of his youth that follows is drawn from the work of his eldest son, José de los Reyes y Sevilla, Biografia del Senador Isabelo de los Reyes y Florentino, Padre de los Obreros y Proclamador de la Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Manila: Nueva Era, 1947), pp. 1–6; José L. Llanes, The Life of Senator Isabelo del los Reyes (monograph reprinted from the Weekly Magazine of the Manila Chronicle, July 24 and 31, and August 7, 1949), pp. 1–6; and the entry under his name in National Historical Institute, Filipinos in History, vol. 2 (Manila: NHI, 1990), pp. 137–9.

  2. According to Leona Florentino’s semi-official minibiography, she was born into a rich Vigan family on April 19, 1849. Her parents had the same surname and were probably cousins of sorts. It seems that both were also close relatives of José Rizal’s maternal grandfather. She was a precocious child, and started to compose verses at the age of ten, in Ilocano and in the Spanish her friar tutor taught her. She was married off at the age of fourteen, and gave birth to Isabelo at sixteen. Alas, she died at thirty-five, leaving five children behind. See the entry for her in National Historical Institute, Filipinos in History, vol. 5 (Manila: NHI, 1996), pp. 141–2.

  3. References hereafter will be mainly to the original text, published in Manila in 1889 by Tipo-Lithografia de Chofré y C. Where relevant, comparisons will be made with a recent reprint combined with an English translation by Salud C. Dizon and Maria Elinora P. Imson (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1994), to be referred to henceforth in abbreviated fashion as Dizon-Imson. This new version, a valuable endeavor in many ways, is nonetheless marred by hundreds of errors of translation, and some mistakes in the Spanish transcription.

  4. El folk-lore filipino (henceforward EFF), p. 8.

  5. Ibid., p. 19.

  6. Dizon–Imson, p. 30.

  7. Isabelo identified him as José Lacalle y Sánchez, a professor of medicine at the University of Sto. Tomás. EFF, p. 13.

  8. EFF, p. 14.

  9. Dizon–Imson, p. 24.

  10. Ibid., p. 11. The editors say that the book, a compilation by various hands and edited by Fr. Andrés Naves, was published in Manila in 1877 by Plana y C.

  11. EFF, p. 13.

  12. Dizon–Imson, p. 13.

  13. EFF, pp. 18 and 17.

  14. José Rizal, Noli me tangere (Manila: Instituto Nacional de Historia, 1978), frontispiece.

  15. EFF, p. 15. Juan Luna (1857–99), whom we shall meet again, was a fellow Ilocano who became the most famous native painter of the Spanish colonial era. His The Death of Cleopatra won the second medal at the 1881 Fine Arts Exposition in Madrid, his Spoliarium a gold medal at the same venue in 1884, and his The Battle of Lepanto a gold medal at the Barcelona Fine Arts Exhibition in 1888. Félix Resurrección Hidalgo y Padilla (1853–1913) was only slightly less successful. Hidalgo was a Tagalog, born in Manila and raised there like Luna.

  16. Ibid., p. 74. In successive footnotes Isabelo gives the titles of these authors’ works: El Folk-Lore Andaluz; Costumbres populares andaluzas; El Folk-Lore de Madrid; Folk-Lore Gallego; Folk-Lore de Asturias. He also casually mentions an earlier work of his own, described as a largo juguete literario (long literary skit), entitled El Diablo en Filipinas, según rezan nuestras crónicas (The Devil in the Philippines, as our chronicles tell it).

  17. Ibid., p. 75. Sources given are: Pedroso’s above-cited work; Rolland’s Faune populaire de la France; Castelli’s Credenze ed usi populari siciliani; V. Gregor’s Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East Scotland (sic); and Larousse’s Grande dictionnaire encyclopédique du XIX siècle. From Isabelo’s footnotes, we can see that he was able to move out of Spanish to the other big Romance languages (French, Italian and Portuguese), and to English. German, which, as we shall see, was crucial for Rizal, seems to have been beyond his orbit.

  18. Dizon–Imson, p. 32.

  19. Ibid., pp. 258–9.

  Allá … Là-bas

  Sunlit, but exactly why? Perhaps the best way to understand is to contrast Isabelo’s temperament, experience, and work with those of his distant Tagalog cousin José Rizal, which this chapter begins to do.

  Isabelo was an ebullient, practical, hugely energetic man, not much given to introspection. He got married when he was twenty, and his first wife had already given successful birth six times when she died in tragic circumstances in the early spring of 1897. (Subsequently, he married in succession a Spanish woman and a Chinese, both of whom died in childbirth, and both of whom gave birth nine times.)1 With a large family to feed, he busied himself with successful literary and cultural journalism, folklore studies, and various small-business sidelines, until the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution in 1896, to which he was initially a surprised spectator. Even though his hostility to the Orders was patent, his writings do not seem ever to have got him to any serious political trouble. He was a provinciano who had made good in the colonial capital, and he was generally satisfied with his life. He did not go to Europe till the summer of 1897, at the age of thirty-three, and it was, as we shall see, entirely against his will—he was sent, in chains, to the torture fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. The Europe he knew as a youngster came to him through the post—letters, books, and magazines from friendly academics, amateur folklorists, and journalists on the other side of the globe. Radiant progress was at hand.

  Rizal, three years older, could not have been less sunlit: brooding, sensitive, endlessly introspective, impractical, and quite aware of his genius. He got married, perhaps, only on the night of his execution, and had no children. He left for Europe in 1882, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, and stayed there—first in Spain, then in France, Germany, England, and Belgium—for most of the next ten years. A natural polyglot, he acquired English, and German, and even some Italian. Without a doubt, he knew Europe better and more widely than any of his countrymen. He made plenty of personal friends in the professional ethnological circles of Western Europe, but most of his early published writing consisted of elegantly polemical articles on political subjects relating to the condition of his colonized patria. Then he turned novelist, publishing Noli me tangere in 1887, and El Filibusterismo in 1891, most likely the only “world-class” novels created by an Asian in the nineteenth century. Overnight, as it were, he became the most controversially famous “native” in his country.

  In a limited sense, these novels came out of the blue. Prior to Noli me tangere only one novel—very bad indeed—had ever been written by a Filipino.2 But the situation looks rather different if one reflects on their appearance in a wider context.

  TRANSNATIONAL LIBRARIES

  Until the middle of the nineteenth century the production of “great novels” was largely a French–English duopoly. After that, the boundaries of what Pascale Casanova has agreeably called “la république mondiale des lettres” began rapidly to globalize.3 The astonishing Moby Dick of Melville (b. 1819) appeared in 1851, followed by the scarcely less amazing The Confidence Man in 1857; the Oblomov of Goncharov (b. 1812) also appeared in 1857, followed by the On the Eve (1860) and Fathers and Sons (1862) of Turgenev (b. 1819). Eduard Douwes Dekker (b. 1820) published Max Havelaar, the first major anticolonial novel, in 1860. The year 1866 saw the publication of Crime and Punishment and War and Peace by Dostoievsky (b. 1821) and Tolstoi (b. 1828). Then the Third World started to kick in with Memorias póstumas de Bras Cubas (1882) by Brazil’s Machado de Assis (b. 1839). Rizal’s own generation included Poland’s Conrad (b. 1857), Bengal’s Tagore (b. 1861), and Japan’s Natsume (b. 1867), though their major novels were only published after those of the ill-fated Filipino. Seen from this angle, Rizal’s works still seem precocious, but not at all magically eremitic.

  Casanova makes a strong argument that historically writers on the periphery of the World Republic of Letters have found their originality in trying to break into the Capital of Letters by challenging its premises in different styles. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to outlining how and where Rizal went about this task. It has to be conceded at the start that the evidence external to the novels is rather skimpy. Although Rizal kept up a huge correspondence, of which a surprisingly large part has been preserved, as well as diaries, and various unpublished pieces on literary matters, he was generally tight-lipped about other writers, novelists in particular: his comments comprise a youthful short essay, in French, on Corneille’s originality, a later short piece from Berlin (again in French, written in 1887) on Daudet’s Tartarin sur les Alpes, a few sentences on Eugène Sue and Douwes Dekker, some admiring passages on Schiller, and quotations from Heine.4

  The records of two personal libraries offer some indirect additional indications. The library that Rizal himself brought back from Europe included texts by Chateaubriand, A. Daudet, Dumas père (5), Hugo, Lesage, Sue (10), Voltaire, and Zola (4) for France; Bulwer-Lytton, Defoe, Dickens, and Thackeray for England; Goethe and Hoffman for Germany; Manzoni for Italy, Douwes Dekker for the Netherlands, and Cervantes for Spain. His correspondence makes it clear that he had also read Andersen, Balzac, Hebel, and Swift.5 This list is unlikely to represent fully what he had with him in Europe, since he knew his books would be thoroughly inspected by the colonial customs and police on his return home. But it shows unmistakably how central to his novelistic reading was France.

  Recently, the books and papers left behind after the death of the medical doctor and distinguished philologist Trinidad Pardo de Tavera have been catalogued and made available to researchers at the Ateneo de Manila University. Rizal was a close friend of Pardo, in whose palatial rooms he stayed for part of the seven months he spent in the French capital in 1885–86. This was the period when he started composing Noli me tangere. In Pardo’s list France is represented by About (2), Adam, Balzac, Banville (2), Barbusse, Barrès, Bibesco, Bourget (2), Farrère (3), Flaubert, France (5), Hugo, Lorrain, Maupassant (2), Molière (collected works in 6 volumes), Prévost, and Zola; Spain by Alarcón, Baroja (2), Blasco Ibáñez (10), Galdós (16), and Larra; Russia by Andreyev (6), Chekhov (3), Dostoievsky (3), Gorki (4), and Turgenev; and the Anglo-Saxons merely by Conan Doyle (2), Haggard, O. Henry (4), Kipling, Sinclair, and Thackeray (collected works in 22 volumes). Once again, French authors are completely dominant.6 The main differences between the two libraries are the absence of Germany in Pardo’s, and the peculiar near-absence of Spain in Rizal’s.

  In Pardo’s flat. Rizal is in the back row, second from left.

  With this suggestive, but inconclusive background, it is time to see what Rizal’s novels themselves may reveal. There are several surprises in store.

  NITROGLYCERINE IN THE POMEGRANATE

  For all its satirical brilliance and the synoptic picture it gives of late-nineteenth-century colonial society in the Philippines, Noli me tangere can be said—up to a point—to be realist in style. A wealthy young mestizo, Crisóstomo Ibarra, returns to his country after years of study in Europe, with the intention of marrying his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara and starting a modern secular school in his home town. By the end of the novel these dreams are in ruins, thanks to the machinations of reactionary, lustful members of the Orders, and to the corruption and incompetence of the colonial administration. Maria Clara, who is revealed to be the child of an adulterous Franciscan friar, retires to the nameless horrors of a convent, and Ibarra himself seems to have perished, gunned down by the regime after being framed by the Orders for a revolutionary conspiracy.7

  El Filibusterismo is much stranger. The reader gradually discovers that Ibarra did not die after all—his noble alter ego, Elias, sacrificed his own life to save him. After many years of wandering in Cuba and Europe, and having accumulated untold riches as a jewel merchant, Ibarra returns to his homeland in the bizarre disguise of “Simoun,” a gaunt figure with long white locks and deep-blue spectacles that conceal the upper part of his face. His aim is to corrupt further an already corrupt regime, to the point that an armed uprising will occur that will destroy the colonial system and liberate Maria Clara. The climax of the narrative is a plot to detonate a huge nitroglycerine bomb, concealed in a jeweled lamp shaped as a pomegranate, at a grand wedding attended by the entire colonial elite. The conspiracy, however, goes awry. Maria Clara is discovered to be already dead, and Simoun, gravely wounded, dies on a lonely shore before he can be apprehended. Nothing in “real” Philippine history remotely corresponds to Simoun and his outré scheme. One could perhaps think (not entirely amiss, as will be shown later) that the novel was proleptic fiction, set in a time as yet to come—although no other Filipino would write the future like this for more than a century. What inspired Rizal to write Noli me tangere’s sequel in such a peculiar way?

  A LEGACY FROM BALTIMORE?

  For the title of the book I finished in 1998, I mistranslated a brilliant phrase that occurs early on in Noli me tangere: “el demonio de las comparaciones.” Rizal used the phrase to describe the young Ibarra’s eerie experience on seeing again the seedy Jardín Botánico of Manila, and perversely finding himself helplessly imagining in his mind’s eye the grand botanical gardens he often visited in Europe. It is as if he can no longer see what is in front of him simply as a familiar object. But the demonio also works on the author himself, who is writing in Paris and Berlin about a young man allá (“yonder, yes yonder, yonder, yonder”) in Manila, who is thinking about … allá, that is, Berlin and Paris.8 Ravished by this complex image, I completely overlooked one crucial thing. Noli me tangere is full of scorching epigrams and witty reflections, but there is no other phrase that is both eerie and unsatirical like this.